


The Gift that Keeps Regifting

by Chocolate Chip (chocolate_chip)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Episode Tag, Fluff, M/M, carlos is the perfect boyfriend, episode 37, let's hope this is what happened anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-18
Updated: 2013-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-05 00:25:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1087403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chocolate_chip/pseuds/Chocolate%20Chip
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil goes in search of that person who will make him feel better about the day's events. He finds someone else there, too. Episode 37 tag.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gift that Keeps Regifting

“Hey,” Carlos called from the kitchen, taking dinner out of the oven. The table was set for two. Cecil was pretty sure he hadn’t called Carlos to tell him he was coming over. He didn’t remember calling him. On the other hand, he didn’t really remember much of anything about how he’d gotten there from the station. He looked around Carlos’ apartment in dazed confusion, as if he would find there some answers to the horrible, vast _unknown_ hanging over him. Carlos gave him a quick kiss and a sympathetic smile. “I caught your show. I thought you might come over.”

“Oh.” Well, that at least saved him the trouble of having to explain to Carlos that his heart — and lungs, and spleen, and skin — now belonged to someone else. “What happened to your TV?”

“Oh, well, you know.” Carlos shrugged. “I didn’t really watch it that much, so there wasn’t much point. And it was too big, you know? Besides,” he took off Cecil’s jacket and hung it next to the door, “once we get our own place, we’ll just use yours. Mine would have been redundant.” Carlos’ arms loosely circled Cecil’s waist, their weight on his hips a familiar comfort. “You okay?”

Cecil sighed. “Not really.”

“Well, I know what’ll make you feel better. Wait right here.” He returned with a plain envelope that had _to Cecil_ scrawled on the front. He grinned. “I know it’s early, but Merry Christmas.”

Cecil looked at Carlos, confused, since Christmas was traditionally celebrated by cowering around one’s bloodstone circle in preparation for the ritual Shunning of the Firstborn, but he took the envelope. It was white, letter-sized, with the tell-tale bulge of an envelope meant for an 8 ½ by 11 holding a sheet of 9 by 12. It wasn’t sealed. Inside was a thick piece of paper, neatly folded into three. Cecil unfolded it. It was indeed 9 by 12. It bore the scarlet seal of the Sheriff’s Secret Police, and the words “Lot 37” featured prominently across the top.

“You were there?” Cecil asked, when words finally came.

“Yeah, I was hoping to buy back all my pens and pencils that got confiscated back in April. They were lot 44. But then your lot came up, and you were pretty out of it, so....”

Cecil stared at the paper in his hands, at Carlos’ looping signature at the bottom, and he could feel that utter unknown, that oppressive void of helplessness, dissolve into the more familiar unknown of seeing the future stretch out in front of you, and knowing the only way to get there is by your own, inadequate hand. He was not sure which was more terrible, but at least one of them was all his.

“What about your pens?”

Carlos shrugged again. “That trick you showed me with the ketchup works pretty well.”

Cecil felt himself tearing up. “Thank you.” It was the only sentence simple enough to express the complexity of everything he wanted to convey.

Carlos smiled and kissed him again. “Seriously, though, that’s your Christmas present, because I had to return the gold cufflinks I bought you to pay for it.” He was already at the table, pouring the wine, oblivious to the slowly tumbling weight of Cecil’s world reasserting itself.

Cecil looked around the apartment again. This was how love was measured, he thought, in the distance between two plates at a dinner table, in the amount of ketchup that can be put in a cocktail straw, in the missing weight of two gold cufflinks, in blank space on a living room wall. In seeking solace in another person, and finding yourself there as well.

“This is, absolutely, the most wonderful, most amazing gift anyone has ever given me,” he told Carlos as he wrapped his arms around him. “Can I give it back?”

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Yeah, so my inspiration for this is totally so that I can have submissive!Cecil imaginings without Carlos being creepy. And now I shall go have them. A lot.


End file.
